


Sing For Me

by larkingstock



Series: prompt nonsense [9]
Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, Loretta's road to world domination begins here, Rape/Non-con Elements, Raylan never returns to Kentucky, choose not to warn BUT, for this one I'd say a lot of them apply, prompt, so: Content Warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 22:11:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17795678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkingstock/pseuds/larkingstock
Summary: In the absence of a Harlan-born lawman, Harlan takes care of its own. In this case, in the form of Coover Bennett being the one to find Loretta when Jimmy Earl Dean abducts her. Bonding ensues.(Part of a larger dark!AU idea where Loretta undertakes her own vengeance on Mags, Harlan-County-style.)





	Sing For Me

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: **unexpected gestures**
> 
> This (larger, kinda dark) idea has been lurking for a while, telling me there's no way it could work, until it dawned on me that the only thing it needs is that Raylan never returns to Kentucky and Loretta's on her own against Mags. The idea that Coover's the obvious pawn/muscle to subvert and manipulate to her own side if possible (and my own desire to kinda sorta rescue the big fucked up mutt from his mother and brother) finally came together when I saw this prompt and it all fell into place. Haaaaaappy Valentine's Day.
> 
> I don't usually go into detail for content warnings, but to ease my own conscience, I'll put the basics in the notes at the end.
> 
>  
> 
> The prompt nonsense series: the ongoing travails of one anon's quest to reacquire their errant writing mojo, with no guarantee of consistency, continuity, compliancy, or character appreciation.

It hurts, it _hurts_ , and Loretta hasn't screamed, won't scream, won't give him the satisfaction, won't give him anything but she's afraid, she's so afraid it's all she's got left to hold onto and because it won't matter, he's taking it anyway and he _likes_ it. She keeps choking half breaths around the balled rags of her own panties that he'd taped into her mouth, lightheaded from shallow oxygen, one entire side of her face a swollen wall of pain from when he'd backhanded her after one too many "smart remarks." It hurts so bad, her breasts raw from him, his hands and his teeth, and now, now, down between her legs--

She can't scream, she can't scream, and he shoves all the way in and she _screams_ , gurgled around the gag, a roaring in her ears, rolling unheeding on the pain of her bound wrists on the splintery floor underneath her hips, mindlessly trying to get away from the rending pain of him, his hot wet breath puffing over her face, his sickly, suffocating aftershave, his relishing chuckle above her.

"Yeah, knew I could make you sing for me, little la--"

She screams again, it all happens so fast and it seems like it's the only thing her body knows how to do anymore, screaming as there's a roar that's somehow not her own rushing blood in her head, the whole world yanked around her and then the weight of the grown man on top of her is gone. There's a yell, and a crash, and a heavy, meaty thump, and...silence.

All she can hear is her own breath, high and whimpering, and she can't open her eyes, she can't because if she does she'll scream again, scream shrill and helpless and hurting and she _can't_ , and then there's a nasally deep breath of someone else standing over her and she tries to drag her aching legs together up into a curl, she's too, too scared to open her eyes--

"Oh, Jesus," she hears, distantly, and then there's something soft and warm over her, covering her up as a sting rips across her lips, and she can spit out her panties, draw a deep, shuddering and silent, silent, silent breath.

The smoky funk of good weed and stale male sweat envelops her in a haze as familiar as breathing as she rolls on her side, curls up under the grubby flannel shirt, the collar flopping across her cheek, and for a second, one broken second in her mind it smells so deeply, heartbreakingly right she's convinced her daddy came found her, came saved her.

Even before huge hands hold her bruised wrists behind her carefully still, a snick of a knife setting them free from the too-tight tape, she knows it's not her daddy, but somehow she can't make it matter the right way in the pieces of her brain. The massive, strong, male hands are fumblingly trying to close up the huge shirt fully around her, protect her naked body instead of ripping everything away and her arms are lost inside its endless sleeves and she still throws them around the body as big and safe as a tree trunk that isn't, isn't her daddy but it doesn't matter and she shakes and she sobs and sobs and sobs.

The man's gone frozen under her grip, and she recognizes, like to animal like, the grip of terror on a body, and it only makes her cling harder, sob harsher, wailing, everything that was broken and smashed in her spilling out beyond her control and she's hysterical, some part of her mind knows this. The rest of her doesn't care, and grabs mercilessly onto the person in front of her because she can't grab onto herself, there's nothing left, Jimmy Earl Dean took it all.

The huge paw of a hand pats her shoulder, in a gesture more frightened than comforting, and somehow that's almost better. That she's so small and so easily crushed and this mountain of a person she's latched onto can feel so indestructible and still be so scared and bewildered, too--because of _her_ \--and can smell so very, very _safe_...

She scrambles closer, right into his lap, she tucks her head into his chest, and takes a deep breath, and Loretta _screams_.

In the silence that follows, it seems like it's still ringing around them, around and around, but right there in the middle, in the sheer solidness of his body around hers, there's a place where she can breathe. There are arms around her now, heavy and uncertain, patting her arm gingerly as a baby bird and she feels like one, trembling so hard she's practically vibrating, but she can breathe. She can breathe.

So she breathes, and she breathes, and it's not just his shirt as big as a dress all around her nearly to her knees, it's right down outta his pores, the smell of leaf and male rising from his very body and she breathes and breathes it, sinking right into it until everything else fades near insensible.

Loretta doesn't know how long it is before the daze starts to clear, enough to register a hand on her head, an awkward petting, gentling her down where hanks of her hair had been jerked by the vicious handful, and there's a rumble of some kind of...tune, crooned to her in mangled snatches and off-key hums, a lullaby that this distantly-familiar stranger has been _singing_ , to her, for a while and very very badly, and she doesn't know why it so badly makes her want to laugh.

The little gasp that escapes her makes him go silent, a loss that nearly overwhelms her with sadness. "You don't have to stop," she whispers, a little imploringly, and then freezes to realize what she's done. Speaking, pleading. The pain of doing one, and the pride of not doing the other, but all she gets in response is an uncomfortable grumbling sound, a throat being cleared.

"You...okay?"

The voice is one she knows, vaguely, strains of sullen and belligerent and boomingly cheerful like rippling echoes through her memories, but she doesn't try to locate them, right now. It's enough that she's safe. She doesn't want to know anything else, right now. Anything that might tell her she might not be safe, that she's taking her life in her hands to be gripping them so fiercely around into the back of this person's t-shirt. That this moment is impossible, this isn't how it should go. If she knows that, it might stop, and it can't stop, right now. It can't.

So she squeezes her closed eyes, and squeezes the body she's wrapped around and who's wrapped around her and who hasn't hurt her, yet, at all. She can't answer his question, she doesn't know if she ever will be able to, but she can, _wants_ , to burrow into the impossibility of him and this moment and say, small and trembling and sure, "Thank you. Thank you."

There's a second, a long bottomless second in which the whole world seems to hang, trembling too, and yet it doesn't scare her, and then he squeezes her so, so carefully back, silent. They sit, just like that, stretching the impossible moment into whole minutes, until she's just slumped, exhausted, completely against him, until it seems neither of them are trembling or afraid or uncertain at all. Until it's still impossible, but it's theirs, too, and that means they don't have to be scared in it.

After another minute or two the various sorenesses in her break through into her awareness, and she can't keep the dismayed little moan in, either. The sound of her pain makes him go still, again, but this time it doesn't feel like fright or confusion, and somehow that makes her not frightened or confused either. She's hurt. That's all. She was hurt, and she can deal with it.

Loretta takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with a scent she can now distinguish in its differences from her daddy, sourer and muskier--and much better weed, honestly--a scent that, whatever happens now, she knows she will always associate with this, with being held _safe_ right in the heart of every unsafe thing in the world, and she opens her eyes.

Coover Bennett, sweat and weed and hulking, bullish temper spread around the town and the whole wide world like looming thunder is looking back at her. Still basically hugging her. Blinking sunken, bloodshot, soft green eyes at her, settling their dull anger around her like another flannel shirt, like he wouldn't but he doesn't know what else to do with her but include her inside it, now, here with him.

Her mouth has opened, but she's not surprised, not really, rolling thunder echoes having already prepared her way down in the back of her memory for seeing the best herb-grower in the state or further, and her daddy's sorta-rival in the trade, she supposes, long ago, like this afternoon, when anything like that mattered.

He's three times her size and could throw her across the room if he wanted to, but he doesn't so much as pull away from where her tiny shoulder is still pressed against the slab of his barrel chest, let alone turf her right off his lap, like she half-expected. He just clears his throat again, phlegmy. "There--there's a sink. Over'na corner. If y'want to...clean."

He saw her. It dazzles, nauseatingly, over Loretta that he saw...her. All of her. Knows she's bloody and hurt between her legs because he saw it, saw her scraped little breasts and heard her screams...

...but he'd just covered them, and held them all together when she couldn't, and she swallows, and lets his knowledge in his blunt, dumb, angry eyes be something that she doesn't have to protect herself against. Lets it be something that is...safe. Impossibly safe. If only in this moment, because later it might not be, but that's later and it has to be later, because if she has to protect herself against it right now she'll break, again, she can't do it.

So instead she nods, unable to look away just yet, and her first pull of effort to make her body be...her body, again, moving under her own conscious will, just sets her to shaking again, so violently that it actually startles him.

"Whoa," Coover slows her, his deep voice actually _soothing_ , and this time the bleakly-dazzled laugh does burst out of her. He frowns, but a disconcerted line pulls his mouth into something of a--well, not a smile. But. "Uh, if I--do y'want me to..."

She shakes her head, closing her eyes and breathing deeply for a few moments, before forcing her will through her shaking limbs. She is _going_ to stand.

Loretta's wobbling like a newborn foal and Coover's hands at her arm and waist are doing half the work, but she's on her feet, and then he's standing up too, towering over her and the sheer presence of it hit like a cave-in, or what she always imagined that must be like, but coming up at her in reverse, and--if she weren't so close to dizzily falling down again, it might have been enough to make her bolt. But her own weakness and that scent of him holds her body rooted right where it is, with just a squeak when he quickly reaches down and twitches the hanging-open folds of his shirt closed, wrapped around her like a robe.

For a few more moments she just grips his arms, thick with brutal male muscle and rough with coarse male hair, the physical revulsion battling the physical need for his strength as she breathes and breathes, until her legs firm under her and her spine straightens, and she can let him go.

She looks up, and Coover looks down, and then he nods. She follows the flick of his eyes towards the corner where the sink is--Jimmy Earl Dean brought her to "lie low" in one of the Bennetts' sheds, halfway to the state line, which must be how Coover found her, which must mean they were searching, which means Mags knows, which means...too, too many things, right now, and she puts it away for later before it shuts her mind down, again. There's a sink in the corner, and her overalls in mostly one piece on the floor, and she uses the torn wreckage of her cotton top to swab away what blood and pain and dirt she can with cold water.

She shuffles back, her boots back on but unlaced, the burning, aching space between her legs nakedly unprotected by panties, the rough seams of her overalls squeaking pain into her abraded skin and the tent of Coover's thick flannel shirt buttoned up all the way to the top, rolling up sleeves that are still flopping to her wrists, and finds Coover coming back towards her, his big face grim.

"I ain't called Mama yet," he begins. His eyes are almost searching, on hers, like a child not sure he's doing the right thing, and Loretta frowns, another strangely familiar feeling. Like she's as much a grown up in the situation as the man in front of her, but--right now, oh God, right now she can't be the grown up, not right now, she can barely manage to be her own small self, just a girl, and if he leans on her, that'll break her too, she never knew how breakable she was and she _hates_ Jimmy Earl Dean, hates him to every breakable fiber of her being for forcing her to know it, that inside she'll never be safe or a child again.

She just looks back, helpless and not understanding, and somehow that makes Coover look...older. Firmer, a purpose in his face when he meets her eyes more clearly, in this impossible place of theirs, like they're equals, that he might need her but that she can lean on him the way she needs, too. "He's still breathing," he says, steady now. She takes a sharp breath, hadn't even thought about...that. _Him_. But Coover doesn't hesitate. He looks at her, totally calm. "Do you want me to do anything about that?"

Loretta gapes at him, at his unmoving expression and everything he's offering her in this moment and all the hatred jammed into her body and her soul jangling. After a moment she draws herself up, forces herself to stride with hard muscles and hard jaw over to where Jimmy Earl Dean is sprawled on the floor, his chest going up and down, up and down with a soft whistling, an almost musically wet sound, and a visible, bloody indent in the back of his head.

His eyes are open. Sightless, he can't see her, or anything probably, and his chest is still going up and down, up and down, breathing.

His pants are undone. She can't see...it, but she raises her foot anyway and stomps, as hard as she can, and then kicks when his body doesn't even react. She kicks again, and then again, so wildly she almost overbalances and it's Coover's arms that keeps her from crashing over right back down on the ground, down there with Jimmy Earl Dean, and she looks up into Coover's big mean face.

"Kill him," she says, distinctly, deliberately, with every furious unchildish fiber of her being.

And Coover just nods, sets her back on her feet, kneels down with his hand as wide as Jimmy Earl Dean's neck, and she watches every single second of it as he chokes the breath out of him, and makes her vow upon it that nothing and no one is ever going to make her scream again.

**Author's Note:**

> content warning: begins with interrupted underage rape, ends in murder of the rapist.


End file.
